Hackety hacketing away… We designed, built, wrapped up, and submitted today to the Samsung S Pen Challenge our Name Games Scratch-Off Android mobile app. Speed-learning Android development has been interesting… some things that were fast and easy to find code examples for in iOS were very slow to do so in Android. On the other hand, there are aspects of the environment that are attractive, including under-the-hood access to the XML design files for layout/animation/menu/rotate/etc. The speed of deploying the app on actual Android phones (multiple) and creating a distributable binary is really where Android development beats iOS hands-down.

Here’s how the game looks.

How to Play

1. Log in to LinkedIn

2. Guess the name of the contact whose photo and headline are shown. Read the headline that scrolls in a marquee to help jog your memory.

3. Need a hint? Scratch the S Pen across the silver scratch-off area to uncover the first letter of the first name. Creative types can scratch off horizontal lines to peek without totally giving up.

4. Know it or Give up? Tap the blue button to reveal the name.

5. Aaah! Got it right? Self-score by tapping the green checkmark button. Got it wrong? Tap the red x button. There’s no point in cheating now or lying to yourself – you’d only be harming your ability to practice and finally learn that person’s name.

6. Want to finish the game early? Tap the “-” button in the contact count section. Don’t want the party to end? Tap the “+” button to add contacts to this round.

7. When you’re done, you’ll see the percent you got right. Play again, to see another random set of your contacts!

The Name Game board

-The contact photo shows at the top center

-The contact headline shows below the photo

-The Name-Power meter on the top left shows how well you know them

-The Contact Worth meter on the top right shows how much that contact is worth, based on an algorithm using their position, number of connections, and other special sauce.

-The silver scratchable area obscures the name. By scratching it off a little at a time, you can give yourself hints that make your brain work (go ahead – cheat a little!)

-The blue button reveals the contact name

-Once the name is revealed, the green check and red x self-scoring buttons are shown

-The bottom left shows round statistics

-The green number shows how many you got right this round

-The red number shows how many you got wrong this round

-The # card sections shows how many contacts are left this round. Use the “+” and “-” buttons to add or remove contacts to the round.

-NP shows your Name-Power, which is generated from a number of data points of your play and general coolness

-XP shows your experience: it always goes up!

TEAM

The team for this hack consists of Patricia Ju (product design/developer) and Jenny Bennett (product design).

WHY NAME GAMES?

Knowing someone’s name opens a door to their world. It increases your confidence in approaching them, and makes them feel important and welcome. This is a mass-market app with wide need and appeal. We will deploy a free version for both Android and iOS to generate high adoption, and then generate revenue from in-app and separate app purchases and subscriptions to additional games, higher numbers of contacts, ad-hoc grouping of contacts, integration into event management/ticketing sites, etc. At $1.99 per month a subscription, we need only 42K users to exceed $1M in revenue.